Coming Down

I had a good cry last night. It's one thing to hear the word "poverty" as an American, and quite another to be there, to see it, to smell it, to touch dirty people who have flies crawling over their crusty scabs. To see children who are hungry -- and not just hungry, starving -- to say it's heartbreaking is not the right word. It's wrong. It is horribly, terribly wrong to have children starving in our world. And yet it's not just Haiti but so many other poor countries where this is happening. My brain is starting to see a small corner of the problem of world poverty, and my soul hurts.

And yet -- sitting down across from a dirty, poor, underfed Haitian, I looked in her eyes and all I saw was the humanity. That other than having been born in a different place, this person was human like me, was just like me. They could BE me. So I didn't have any reservations whatsoever about reaching out and touching them like I would anyone else, dirty or not. Their humanity was utterly compelling.

The experience really made me realize that we as Americans do so much categorizing people. "Muslims are..." or "Black people are..." or "People in poor countries do this..." and that when you sit across from a human being and touch them, you realize that categorizing people at all is fundamentally flawed. And when you take away the boxes that you have people in in your mind, you have to address each person in the world as an individual. That is hard to imagine, and yet so freeing.

- Megan